To Free a Spy

by Nick Ganaway

  His plan wasn’t original. The same thing had been done in the United States more than once. And this wouldn’t come close to the eleventh of September achievement. But none of the previous operations were carried out by one man working alone. Fumio Yoshida, the Japanese he’d made arrangements for, worked only with Petrevich and his two underlings but failed. This time the credit would go to Seth. Unlike others, he would escape to strike again. He would be the force dominating the news now, the object of endless, exhausting, futile searches worldwide. The mention of his name would from this day forward create a quickening of the pulse. He would be the new symbol of justice in the Middle East, the icon of fear in America. The replacement symbol for bin Laden, who had lost his life because of complacency and carelessness.

  Seth had studied structural design at the German university he attended and knew how and where to place explosives for greatest results. During his DCPSS service trips to the Justice building, he surreptitiously took photos and made sketches of the visible structural components in the basement. Soon he had enough data to determine where to park the box truck for maximum effectiveness. Partial devastation of the building was his minimum expectation but total collapse was not impossible. He’d observed and memorized the security procedures and the names of the guards who inspected the vehicles entering the Justice compound. He involved Ana as little as possible and never told her he had selected the Justice building, or when the attack would take place, consistent with the extreme caution that had kept him alive for so long.

  * * *

  On the long-prepared-for Monday morning, Seth was awakened by his iPhone alarm after an hour of sleep. He’d killed the lights around three-thirty that morning when he was sure the bomb and his plan were firmly in place, but his mind ran wild with thoughts of the excitement that awaited him. Now he shaved his face clean and put on a fresh DCPSS khaki shirt and inspected himself in the mirror. He wore a plain white tee shirt under his uniform shirt.

  He had just one more thing to do. When he was two blocks from the Justice Department building he stopped in a loading zone, left the engine running, unlocked the cargo door of the truck, raised it enough to slide under and set the timer for ten minutes. As he started to jump down he thought of the traffic, or maybe a delay at the guard station before he was cleared to drive under the building. Seconds clicked away as he stood there debating with himself. On the other hand he didn’t want to allow time for the bomb to be discovered and disarmed after he parked the truck in place. He reset the timer to thirteen minutes and synchronized his wristwatch so he could monitor the countdown precisely. Seconds were critical. He jammed the large padlock shut.

  Now back in the flow of traffic, he rehearsed everything one last time: What to say to the security guard. Exactly where to leave the truck. His escape route. And don’t attract attention by running. He patted the Uzi under his right thigh. He wouldn’t need it after he got inside and would leave it in the truck with documentation showing his real name, Seth, by which the intelligence agencies of the world knew him, before walking away and disappearing from the building. The adrenaline was flowing. If it wasn’t already famous enough, the name Seth would soon be cemented among the most feared and despised names in the world. But among his brothers he would be proudly spoken of in the most revered terms.

  He was a little relieved when he saw that the guard at the delivery entrance this morning was one he recognized. Their schedules changed from time to time. Seth’s truck was third in line and he’d already used up almost eight of his thirteen minutes. He had five minutes to clear the checkpoint, park the truck and get out of the building. Perfect. When he got to the gatepost he told the guard, “The company truck got a broken axle, Larry. I must use this rental until repairs are made.” He was confident Larry would pass him through as usual without inspecting his cargo.

  Larry nodded his understanding. “Gotta put her in the computer, though, Ahmed. It’ll be just a minute. Hey! You shaved your beard!”

  “Yeah, my girlfriend, she wanted me to.”

  Seth drummed his watch. Three minutes and two seconds to go. He glanced at the hydraulic concrete barrier ahead of him that would recede into the floor when he was cleared for entry.

  At a minute and thirty seconds, Seth looked over to see if Larry was almost finished checking him in, and something moving in the truck’s mirror caught his eye. Black helmets. Black uniforms! Assault weapons! He spun his head around to the other mirror. There too! Larry had disappeared.

  Seth jumped out and wildly sprayed his Uzi as he ran. He was two steps from the truck when his right leg collapsed in burning pain, then something ripped through his neck and he stumbled to the ground. As light faded from his eyes he knew he was dying, but at least the bomb would blow before anyone could disarm it. His name would mean something to the world forever.

  * * *

  It was mid-morning when a direct line to Cross rang in the Oval Office. “Yes?”

  “Warfield.”

  “How did it go?”

  “It’s over. Two FBI agents are wounded but they’ll be okay. Had emergency medical standing by.”

  “The bomb…”

  “Eight seconds to spare.”

  “Seth?”

  “Under heavy guard at a hospital. Took a couple hits. He’ll live, though.”

  “And your Ms. Koronis?”

  “FBI’s picking her up now. I think they had an agent in every tree on her block for the last month.”

  “I want her brought here.”

  “To the White House?”

  “Right here to the Oval Office. I want you here, too, Cam.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  Warfield was sitting with Cross in the Oval Office when Paula buzzed and said the FBI had arrived with Ana.

  “Send her in.”

  “Alone, sir?”

  “The agents can wait at the door.”

  Paula ushered Ana inside the great office. She caught Warfield with a glance and arced her eyebrows over an eye-roll on her way out.

  Cross rose, walked around his desk and waited for a moment as Ana tried to pull herself together. “Ms. Koronis, I don’t know where to begin what I have to say to you.”

  “I, I, uh, please excuse my appearance,” she said. “I had no idea I’d be coming here. It’s been…”

  “I know. I know,” Cross said, putting his arm around her shoulder. “I’m very sorry for what has happened. I wish it could have been different. But I must tell you the United States, and I’m speaking for myself personally as well, we owe you. We owe you an apology for the time you spent in prison. For robbing you of your good name, your freedom. The anguish you’ve suffered. And we owe you our gratitude for the service you provided in bringing Seth down. The tapes. The risk you took.”

  “The tapes? You’ve heard the tapes?”

  “Read the transcripts. Cam brought them in yesterday. The phone taps. The wires you wore at the safe house. You’re good.”

  “He’s my own flesh and blood.” She’d lost her composure and was crying softly. “It wasn’t easy to, to…but I couldn’t have lived with myself unless I at least tried.”

  “It had to be tough,” Cross said.

  Ana nodded and dabbed her eyes. “Cam Warfield made it possible. Without his planning, I don’t know…I couldn’t have pulled it off.”

  “Now tell me what I can do for you,” Cross said.

  She was thoughtful for a long moment. “My life,” she said. “All I want is to get my life back. I have to do that for myself.”

  * * *

  When Ana left, Warfield shook his head. “She’s taken some hits. Prison. Austin. Her brother.”

  “Austin. Biggest disappointment of my life, too. We were like brothers.”

  “He’s paying the price now,” Warfield said.

  * * *

  The following Saturday evening Warfield and Fleming DeGrande picked Ana up at her townhouse and the three of them went out to dinner. They h
ad avoided being seen together during the operation. They were into their second drink when Fleming asked the obvious question.

  “What now, Ana, now that you’re beyond this, uh, detour?”

  “I’m going to organize myself to start writing my book.”

  “You’re doing a book about all of this?” Warfield said, his eyebrows rising. “I see it now. Guess who’s going to be the bad guy,” he said, smiling.

  “Cam, you know I don’t blame you for what happened. Forget that. But I’m not writing about this mess, anyway. I’ve been planning this thriller for years and I’m not putting it off any longer. I’ve saved up enough international intrigue from my legal work for State to do a dozen spy novels. Austin gave me a lot more stuff, talking about operations at the Agency. I made notes from time to time and put them in a safe at the office—at least until my trial. Wasn’t sure what to expect when I picked them up, but nothing had been touched.”

  Warfield said, only half-jokingly, “It could get you another trip to the courthouse.”

  “Don’t worry. No one will recognize the source material when I get through mixing everything up and changing the names.”

  CHAPTER 21

  After the shoot-out at Justice, the press began to look at the sordid mini-dramas that led up to it. Someone was leaking information to reporters and most of it was accurate. Although Warfield disliked leaks and the fact that nothing could ever be kept private in Washington, he was not unhappy about this one. To Washington Post reporter Bob Roberts, Quinn became a personal crusade. He began his research as far back as Quinn’s work on the New Jersey gambling legislation and his political success that followed. He reconstructed the evening of Quinn’s roast and Karly Amarson’s murder, only some of which was speculation on his part.

  When Roberts reported the deal Fullwood made with Senator Abercrombie the Senate launched an investigation, and by the time it got under way, the General Services Administration notified Abercrombie’s real estate firm, as landlord for the FBI office in Taylorville, that it was terminating the lease.

  The GSA fired its man who had conspired with Abercrombie and the FBI arrested him. Abercrombie received the bad news about the lease cancellation from his sister, who called him at his office in Washington late one afternoon. She also told him the banks were initiating foreclosure proceedings. Abercrombie’s staffers found him dead in his office the next morning. There was no note. At first it was reported as a heart attack but the autopsy revealed an extreme overdose of Seconal.

  Fullwood continued his denials right up to the beginning of the Senate hearing, when he was asked whether he and Abercrombie ever had a conversation in which the Senate’s termination of Lone Elm and the FBI’s leasing of office space from Abercrombie were linked in any way.

  “Hell, no!” Fullwood yelled.

  Then the committee attorney played a video which an FBI agent identified as one found in Abercrombie’s office after his death. The conversation between Fullwood and Abercrombie was played for the committee, and for the world on C-SPAN.

  Fullwood’s lawyer requested a recess. Before the hearing resumed the next morning, the lawyer met with the committee chairman and counsel and told them Fullwood was going to submit his resignation to President Cross that day. But if Fullwood thought that would end it he was mistaken. He left Washington in disgrace and returned to his home state, where the next Wednesday federal marshals arrested him at noon at his home. When they marched him out the front door, remote-broadcast trucks from the national and local networks lined the street. A federal grand jury indicted him a week later.

  Warfield arranged a memorial service for Leroy Mitchell, the plumbing contractor for whose death he felt responsible. Reporter Roberts was there. He drew on the irony of Leroy’s wife’s attempt to comfort Warfield in his anguish over Leroy’s death. Warfield put an envelope in her hand when he left the service that day. When Mona opened it, the crinkled photo Warfield had taken from Leroy’s truck was inside with a heartfelt letter from Warfield.

  Congress soon after passed legislation that recognized Leroy Mitchell for his service to the United States and awarded his widow one million dollars.

  * * *

  Within a couple of months after Austin Quinn shot himself, the cable news shows removed the sensational Breaking News graphics that had used up the lower third of the screen, but even then the 24/7 interviews showed no signs of slacking off. News anchors created endless phrasings of the same questions and the Pentagon brass, politicians, nuclear scientists and psychologists appearing with them looked for different ways to answer. It was as if the two groups, the questioners and the answerers, existed for the sole purpose of supporting each other.

  Ana tried to shut it all out—the endless rhetoric, the re-living of it all, the if-onlys—but she wasn’t there yet. She had run the emotional gamut from denial to grief to acceptance of her fate. Now she was free again and in the process of reclaiming her life. She needed the closure that only facing Quinn could bring. She’d asked Warfield to go with her.

  “You can see him now,” the desk attendant said. As she and Warfield followed the white-haired assistant down the echoing hallway, Ana thought of the hospital where she had her tonsils out when she was ten—the plaster walls, the white fish-bowl light globes hanging by a wire from the high ceilings, the small once-white tile hexagons that covered the floor. But there the similarities ended. In this place was a potpourri of odors that was more of death than of life. The air was still. The few staff people around didn’t seem to have anything to do next.

  The hall widened into a circular sitting area that was vacant except for a man in a wheelchair. A black and white television mounted on the wall ran an old Seinfeld show, its contemporary flavor in stark contrast to the place. The man in the wheelchair gave no indication he knew anyone had joined him. Or that the television was on.

  “We told him you were coming but you never know what he understands. You all want me to roll his chair out into the yard?” the attendant asked.

  Ana and Warfield glanced at each other as they came to realize this was the man they had come to see. Ana touched the fingers of her right hand to her lips and drew an audible breath. She wanted to excuse herself. There’s been a mistake. Please forgive me. But there was enough left of the man she’d known, even with this white hair, the black-ringed eye-sockets, that she couldn’t deny him. She couldn’t just walk away.

  “Yes. Yes, please.”

  In the courtyard, Warfield remained standing and Ana sat at the lawn table across from Quinn’s wheelchair. The vacant eyes that rose to meet hers may have flickered recognition but she couldn’t be sure. His hair didn’t completely hide the scars and pink flesh left from the gunshot wound and surgery. A thread of drool had stained the white tunic he wore. His left hand, knotted into a misshapen fist, lay still, dead, as if an attendant had brought it out and placed it there. Quinn’s eyes drifted to the hand, perhaps, Ana thought, to question why it failed to reach out as he willed it to. Ana had to force herself to look at this once-proud man who had been her lover; who only a short time ago sat at the table with the world’s most powerful.

  Sooner than she had planned to leave, Ana knew she could stay no longer. There had been so many victims, so much waste since that black day in Atlantic City when it all began, long before she even knew Quinn. Now here she sat before the man responsible. He had betrayed everything precious and loved and held sacred by those who believed in him. She looked once again into the empty eyes and wondered whether the bullet spared any of the brain cells that accounted for memory.

  She rose and squeezed his hand in hers, and after a few moments nodded to Warfield. As they walked away she knew she would never return. Warfield glanced back at Quinn as they left, and was almost certain he’d seen Quinn looking directly at him before turning his eyes away.

  * * *

  Months after Seth’s capture, in the spring when cherry blossoms defined the Washington landscape, Warfield watched from the f
ront row of the courtroom with Joe Morgan as Seth stood before the United States District Judge James Piller for sentencing, a ragged scar on Seth’s neck showing above his shirt collar. The jury had earlier found him guilty on all of the many counts against him and found for the death penalty. The judge could elect to reduce the sentence to life without parole and Seth’s attorneys had fervently pleaded for that.

  The court had appointed lawyers of Middle Eastern heritage for Seth to avoid any appearance of prejudice by his attorneys. Warfield figured they had coached Seth on respectful behavior before the court, especially now at sentencing.

  “Anything you would like to say to the court before sentencing?” Judge Piller asked Seth, standing between his attorneys before the bench.

  Seth had shown no emotion throughout his trial, including when the jury verdicts were read. Now, his hands and feet shackled, Seth stared at the judge with contempt, his head tilted back, his eyes piercing the judge’s. “America is nothing,” he sneered. “This court is nothing. Your jury is nothing. You have no authority over me. Proceed at your own risk. Any punishment I receive, you and your United States will receive one-hundredfold.”

  Seth then cleared his throat and spat on the polished mahogany front of the bench without ever taking his eyes off the judge. When the bailiffs threw him to the floor he bit one of them before they got him under control.

  Judge Piller, himself shaken, gaveled the alarmed spectators in the courtroom to silence and declared a recess until eight o’clock the next morning.

  Seth’s attorneys looked at each other in dismay. There was no chance now that the judge would reduce the sentence.